Dumpster Rental in UNC Neighborhood, CO

Roll-off containers for UNC Neighborhood homes and jobsites

This is the part of Greeley that runs on an academic calendar, and it is the reason a landlord and property-manager service line exists on this site at all. The University of Northern Colorado sits at 501 20th Street with 8,807 students as of Fall 2025 — the University’s own figure, published by its institutional research office — in a city of 115,073. You can find UNC at unco.edu.

Two notes on naming before anything else. The City’s long range planning division has adopted a “UNC Neighborhood Study”, so “the UNC neighborhood” is the City’s own term and the one we use. We could not establish the study’s boundaries, so we do not draw one; the streets around UNC is a perfectly good description and it is honest. And we use the City’s name for it rather than a grander one somebody invented for a property listing.

What makes this neighborhood commercially different from every other page on this site is the rental share. 39.1 percent of Greeley housing is renter-occupied, against 22.1 percent county-wide — and the concentration of that is here. A rental belt on an academic calendar produces a specific, repeating pattern of work: leases ending and a year of accumulated furniture, mattresses and household goods coming out at once in early May; a much shorter, sharper turnover in mid-August when landlords have days rather than weeks to clear and re-let; and landlord turns, abandonment clearances and property-management cleanouts running quietly all year. We have written the turnover calendar out in full.

Then the first two weeks of May do something no other market on this list does: three separate calendars land on top of each other. The average last spring frost is 12 May, so outdoor demolition, landscaping and lot work do not really start before then and everything that was waiting starts at once. Leases end. And the City of Greeley runs its Annual Spring Clean-Up over two days in early May — the thing a Greeley household reaches for first when it needs to get rid of something.

Except that the Clean-Up cannot help most of the people reading this page, and it is the City’s own rules that say so. It is City residents only, with photo ID. It is two days. There is a per-load fee. Bagged loads are turned away — all materials must be fully visible — and enclosed trailers and box trucks are not accepted. And it expressly refuses “construction or demolition debris (including dirt, concrete, masonry, plywood, and similar materials).” A landlord clearing three houses in a week, in bags, out of a box trailer, cannot use it. Dates move year to year, so call the Clean-Up line on 970-350-9336 or check the City rather than trusting a date on any website, ours included.

The other thing to know about this neighborhood: the housing here is old. It sits in the pre-1980 half of a city whose median home was built in 1985. So a landlord refit is not just a paint-and-carpet job — the lead and asbestos rules below are live on most of these buildings.

What we know about working in UNC Neighborhood

Inside the city limits the City is the government for all of this. § 8-368 requires a license of “all refuse haulers who collect, transport or remove refuse, garbage or ashes within the city”, and § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” through “city-licensed operators.” Greeley does not run the trucks; it licenses the people who do. That is the rule. We say nothing about our own paperwork under it in either direction.

For turnover work the single most useful City provision is § 12-269. Part (a) permits household “trash, garbage or refuse containers for pick-up on public rights-of-way for one 24-hour period within a seven-day period.” That is the weekly bin rule — and it is precisely why a pile of move-out furniture on a curb strip in May is a code problem rather than a solution. The same section requires owners, agents and tenants to keep premises free of accumulated refuse, and part (b) puts the clearing duty for building work squarely on the owner: “All refuse and debris remaining as a result of the demolition or repair of any buildings or the erection and completion of any buildings shall be removed following substantial completion of the work.” There is one more that lands oddly well here: Greeley’s definition of refuse at § 20-974 expressly includes “upholstered furniture… used or stored outdoors in any unroofed area.” A couch on a porch is, in Greeley, legally refuse. That is a City rule, not our opinion, and it is worth knowing before August.

Placement. On a driveway, a yard, or an apartment building’s own parking lot, no Public Space permit is in play at all — and for a multi-unit turn, the building’s own lot is nearly always the right answer. In the street it is a different matter and the City names dumpsters directly: “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881, 2835 W. 10th Street. On these blocks in the first week of May, with the parking already full, plan that one early.

Fire. Five feet from a combustible wall, always. Greeley adopted the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, effective 1 January 2023, with no amendment to Section 304, so the model rule applies as written and every roll-off is far over its smallest threshold. On a multi-unit building with wood balconies and stair towers, the five feet comes off the nearest combustible surface, which is often the stair rather than the wall. Greeley Fire Prevention, (970) 350-9510. Greeley Fire runs seven stations.

What a turnover load actually contains, and what has to come out of it. Mattresses, upholstered furniture, particleboard flat-pack, carpet, small appliances, bagged household goods, and the contents of a hundred kitchen cupboards. Most of that is fine. What is not: electronics, banned from Colorado landfills since 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, and the televisions and monitors students leave behind are the commonest single problem in a May clear. Refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners with refrigerant. Paint, solvents and automotive fluids, which go free to Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, free to every Weld County resident, 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking, nothing in bags — and note that facility takes no electronics and no appliances either. Sort those out before we swap the box, not after.

And on any refit rather than a clearout: this housing is old enough that the pre-1978 federal lead rule is live — Colorado is not EPA-authorized, so firms certify with the EPA directly — and CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B applies to asbestos, with single-family triggers of 32 square feet, 50 linear feet or a 55-gallon drum, 10 working days’ notice, and exemption only for buildings after 12 October 1988. 720-507-5136. A landlord doing a fast turn between tenancies is exactly the person most likely to run into that late.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardSouth of downtown around the university, a short run from the yard
• Main routes20th Street east and west past the campus
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

The runs around campus are short and the grid is simple; scheduling is the hard part, not driving. In the first fortnight of May and again in mid-August we book this neighborhood ahead rather than promising a same-day set, because the whole area turns over at once and a swap that would take an hour in February takes a morning in May. Placement splits by building type. On a single house the drive or the alley pad is the answer, and the alley is usually better — firmer, no permit, no parked cars — provided the neighbors’ bins are moved and the gate is unlocked. On an apartment building the parking lot is the answer, and there we want a corner the residents are not using, clear of the dumpster corral so the regular collection can still get in, and clear of low balconies and stair towers for the five-foot fire separation. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear overhead. Two local details: an empty open-top container is a sail, and this is chinook country, so we want the load kept below the rails and covered; and a container that people can reach from the sidewalk will collect other people’s furniture overnight, which is worth siting around. Tell us the surface, the overhead, the gate width and the finish date, and we will book the set and the pull together. (970) 888-6911.

Routes we run: 20th Street east and west past the campus, 8th Avenue and 11th Avenue north and south to and from downtown, 16th Street and the numbered streets across the rental blocks, the rear alleys, which carry most of the move-out work, US 34 Business for the run around the south side of the city.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in UNC Neighborhood

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. In UNC Neighborhood that question has a short answer, and it is the best news on this page. You are inside the Greeley city limits, and in Greeley somebody is in charge. The UNC neighborhood is a City-adopted study area inside the Greeley city limits — the City’s Long Range Planning division lists the UNC Neighborhood Study among its neighborhood plans. The university itself is at 501 20th Street with 8,807 students in a city of 115,073 that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied against 22.1 percent county-wide, and that tenure figure is the whole reason this page reads differently from the others. That matters because a district is not a government — it has no council, no clerk and no code of its own. The government here is the City of Greeley, a home rule city under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution, and unlike a great many places, it has written down what it wants.

Three things follow, and each of them has a section number. First, Greeley does not run the trash trucks. It licenses the people who do. Greeley Municipal Code § 8-368 provides that “all refuse haulers who collect, transport or remove refuse, garbage or ashes within the city shall be required to have a license,” and § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” acting “by and through its duly authorized agents, employees, contractors or city-licensed operators.” That is a real regime and it applies to everyone working inside these city limits. We describe the rule and say nothing whatever about our own standing under it in either direction — ask us on the phone and you will get a proper answer. Second, the City adopts its own codes: the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, the 2021 International Building Code at § 22-31 and the 2021 International Residential Code at § 22-76, all effective 1 January 2023, with a published 30-inch frost line in Table R301.2(1) of the residential code it adopted. Colorado has no statewide building code, so every jurisdiction adopts separately — and Greeley adopted. Third, the City runs its own fire department, seven stations of it, with a Fire Prevention Bureau on (970) 350-9510. You can read the code yourself at the Greeley municipal code.

And there is one number for the rest of it: Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311. That is the difference this site is built on. In UNC Neighborhood you are not hunting for a desk; you are choosing between two you can name. Underneath the City sits the county, and here the county is a short walk away. Greeley is the county seat, and that is not a ceremonial fact. Weld County administration, the county building department and the county right-of-way permit desk are all at 1150 O Street in Greeley on (970) 400-4000, with Planning and Development Services on (970) 400-6100. Weld County is 3,984.94 square miles and 378,426 people, and every county permit counter that touches a construction job anywhere in it is here. A contractor working out at Briggsdale or Keenesburg sorts the paperwork in Greeley. None of that county machinery governs a job inside the city limits — for a UNC Neighborhood address the City is the answer — but it is worth knowing where it is, because the moment a job moves outside the line, O Street is where it goes. Give us the address and we will tell you which side of that line you are on before we load a truck.

Now the part most of our competitors skip, and in UNC Neighborhood it is unusually easy to state because the City states it. Begin with the line that is safe everywhere: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no Public Space permit is in play at all. None. That covers the overwhelming majority of what we set in UNC Neighborhood. What can still apply on private ground is your covenants, a landlord’s consent, and the fire code — and only one of those three comes with a number attached to it.

What needs a phone call is the street case, and here the City answered the question itself, in writing, before anybody asked. The City’s published permitting guidance names dumpsters directly: “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” That is the City’s sentence, not our summary of it, and note that it covers the signage as well as the permit. The desk is Greeley Public Works Permits on 970-350-9881, at 2835 W. 10th Street. We do not publish a fee for it, because the City sets its fees on an annual schedule we could not retrieve — call and ask, and give it a few days rather than phoning on the morning of delivery. One provision people find for themselves and misread: § 12-269(a) permits trash and refuse containers on the public right-of-way “for one 24-hour period within a seven-day period.” That is the weekly curbside rule for a household cart. It is not a 24-hour pass for a roll-off in a parking lane. The subsection after it, § 12-269(b), requires that debris from demolition and repair work be removed, which is the other half of the same idea. Whether or not a permit is involved, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled. Our Greeley permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

One rule belongs to the driveway itself, and it is a fire rule. Section 304.3 of the International Fire Code provides that a dumpster must not be stored inside a building and must not be placed within five feet of a combustible wall. There is a threshold in that section expressed in cubic yards, and it does not matter here: every roll-off we run is far over it — even a 10 yard is ten cubic yards — so the five-foot rule applies to all of them, always. The debate you will find on the internet about which subsection and which capacity is academic; say five feet and stop. Measure it from the nearest combustible surface rather than from the wall plane, because on a UNC Neighborhood lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard the eave line is what actually decides where the box can sit, and we take that measurement before the rails come off the truck. Two more rules from the same section are worth having on a working site: containers over forty gallons need lids, and materials liable to spontaneous ignition — oily rags, stain and sealant-soaked cloths — belong in a listed disposal container rather than loose in a roll-off. That is a real jobsite fire cause, not a paper rule. Inside the city limits that question has a desk and a number. Greeley Fire Prevention Bureau, (970) 350-9510 — a bureau of the City’s own seven-station fire department, working to the 2021 International Fire Code the City adopted at § 22-454. Greeley makes no amendment to Section 304, so the model rule applies exactly as written.

Last, the run in. Getting a box off the rails cleanly wants roughly 60 feet of straight, about 11 feet of width and 20-plus feet of nothing overhead. In UNC Neighborhood what fails that test is hardly ever the road. It is the final hundred feet of it. Nothing in this county is mountain driving — Greeley stands at 4,676 feet where the Cache la Poudre joins the South Platte, and a truck works a numbered grid in town and a section-line grid outside it — so the obstacles are small, local and entirely predictable once somebody has looked. On the old platted blocks: a service drop slung low over the only way in, a shade tree that has had sixty years to spread, a lot too narrow to swing on, an alley wanting the carts moved and the gate unlocked before we arrive. On the newer western ground: turf laid last month, an irrigation line run shallow alongside the drive, a street sitting on base course and waiting for its top lift. Out on acreage: a quarter mile of lane that has carried a pickup all winter and will cut up under nine tons in April. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you found.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a town hall. The first is what the box is allowed to carry. CDPHE writes the solid waste rules at 6 CCR 1007-2, but the instrument that lets a disposal site exist at all is a county one: a certificate of designation under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, issued by the governing body with jurisdiction and reviewed by the state. Here that governing body is Weld, and the building it works out of is 1150 O Street in Greeley. Past a short list of statutory bans there is no master schedule of refused materials in this state — every facility writes its own into an approved operating plan. Which is why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it, rather than finding out when the ticket comes back.

The bans are brief and two of them trip people up. Electronics have been shut out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, so a television, a monitor or a tower needs a recycler — and the county hazardous waste counter will not take them either, which is the surprise we field most often. Waste tires are refused at the gate, and moving ten or more of them takes a state registration, so they never travel with us. Green material runs the opposite way: Colorado has never put a statewide landfill ban on yard waste, and the gates serving this county list branches and vegetation among what they accept. We still keep it in its own load, for money rather than law. The City’s GROW Center on 970-673-3718 takes grass, leaves, plants, limbs, branches and untreated lumber, though anything painted, stained or nailed together stopped being clean wood the day it went up, and A-1 Organics composts at Eaton on 970-454-3492. Everything wet or reactive — paint, solvent, fuel, automotive fluid, a battery, a propane cylinder, pool chemicals — has somewhere free to go three days a week at 1311 North 17th Avenue here in Greeley, on (970) 400-2217.

Asbestos is where we stop, and there is no version of the job where we do not. Nothing containing it rides in one of our containers. Colorado files it under air quality rather than waste, which catches out anyone who has worked in another state: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division administers it under Regulation 8, Part B. On a single-family house the thresholds are 50 linear feet of pipe covering, 32 square feet of anything else, or a 55-gallon drum by volume; a certified inspector goes in first; the notice period is ten working days; the published fees are $60 for a notice and $180 for a thirty-day permit; and a demolition has to be notified whatever the quantity turns out to be. Anything built after 12 October 1988 is exempt where the documentation shows no asbestos-containing material was used. The line is 720-507-5136. None of that is ours to file — but every bit of it sits in front of the container, and a job halted by an inspector costs a great deal more than a week of waiting for one.

The other year to know is 1978, the cut-off for the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, and Colorado handles it backwards compared with most of the country: the state never took the program over, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA itself. Whether that matters at all depends on where you are standing, and standing here it matters constantly, because close to half of Greeley predates the rule. The median house went up in 1985, roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980, and 7.2 percent of it was already standing in 1939. That is the reason our guide to lead and asbestos in older Greeley homes sits on the front page of this site instead of at the bottom of it. One last item, and it is the one people skip. Ring Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987 before a shovel goes anywhere. C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103 puts the notice at two business days, not counting the day you give it; Colorado 811 asks for three; take the three and you cannot be caught short. Mark the dig in white before you call. Setting a box on a driveway triggers none of this. A footing, a fence line, a stump or a sewer lateral triggers all of it.

What the box stands on settles more arguments in UNC Neighborhood than what size it is, and nearly every habit carried in from a rainier part of the country is the wrong habit here. Greeley sits at 4,676 feet on flat irrigated plain, and the 1991–2020 normal at Greeley–Weld County Airport — our own station, not a borrowed one from down the range — is 15.34 inches of precipitation in a year. What happens below the surface at your particular address is not something we will publish. That takes a geotechnical investigation, and guessing at it in print helps nobody. What is public, regional and genuinely useful is that the Colorado Geological Survey maps a potentially swelling-clay corridor running from Fort Collins and Greeley in the north to Pueblo and Cañon City in the south, with this city at the northern end of it, and clays of that sort can take up a great deal of water. The part we actually work with is the top few inches. Several tons ride on four small pads under a loaded container. Dry, this ground carries them without complaint. Come back after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a thaw and it will take an impression and keep it. Hence the one rule we never bend: concrete rather than turf, mats under every wheel and both rails, on every drop, in every month of the year — and after a wet week we would sooner move a date than cut up two hundred feet of somebody’s drive.

The houses were built for that climate, and they have a floor below grade. Table R301.2(1) of the residential code Greeley adopted publishes a 30-inch frost line, and the county publishes the same number, so footings, water services and sewer laterals all begin below it. A trench that would be trivial in a warm state is a real excavation here, and trench spoil is the heaviest material that comes off a house. That makes a footing repair or a lateral replacement a 10 yard loaded low conversation and never a 20 yard one. Where it changes a cleanout is the stairs, because hand-carrying is the job: a smaller box set close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked wherever suited the truck. Two dates belong in the same breath, since they decide when outdoor work can start at all — the average last spring frost is 12 May and the first fall frost is 8 October. And because it comes up whenever a lower level is opened up: on radon we quote EPA rather than a map, and EPA’s position is that elevated readings have turned up in every zone it draws, so “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The age of the housing splits this market in half, and it is the half nobody expects who knows northern Colorado only from the newer corridor towns. The median Greeley home dates from 1985. Roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980 and 7.2 percent of it was standing before 1940, while 39.1 percent of households here rent, against 22.1 percent across the county. So: an old city sitting inside the fastest-growing county in the state. 115,073 people on 49.09 square miles, incorporated 15 November 1885 out of the 1870 Union Colony, at the middle of a Weld County of 378,426 that turns out over 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas and $2.38 billion of agricultural product a year. Those figures are Census. Translated into containers it means two different loads on the same street: one is plaster, cast iron, pre-1978 paint and a third covering of shingle, the other is new-build tidy-up and a first remodel. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for.

Then the weather, where one hazard outranks the rest of the list put together. Hail is what pays for containers in this county. Northeastern Colorado runs seven to nine hail days a year inside the most hail-prone corridor in the United States, and the work never spreads itself out. It lands in one week, after one storm, with every roofer in Weld dialing the same numbers before eight in the morning. If your roof has just been hit, book it that day — and know that on a Greeley roof there is a sizing consequence attached, because a second course of asphalt still on the deck reaches lawful payload while the box still looks part used. Wind is second, and it is the one that damages property. Chinook downslope events come off the range hard enough to have produced recorded Front Range gusts of 137 mph, and the county publishes a residential design wind of 115 mph. A county does not write a figure like that down for decoration. An empty box walks, a heaped one redistributes itself along the street, and a loose tarp is a kite — so we weight whatever we cover, and we would rather tuck a container behind a windbreak than leave it standing in the open. Third, tornadoes: Weld has recorded more of them than any county in the United States, most of them short-lived landspouts on the Denver convergence zone, most of them on afternoons that looked unremarkable from the ground. And it is not only the big regional events. On 2 June 2014 a breach on the Cache la Poudre sent water into Greeley itself and prompted voluntary evacuations, with damage around 35th Avenue and F Street — a separate event from the September 2013 floods, in a city built at a river confluence. Warnings come out of NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. A container left open through a real storm fills with water and grit, and you then pay us by the ton to carry it away. Cover it, or ask us for a tarp.

And there is one more calendar worth planning around here that no other market in this county has. Every May, three things land in the same fortnight. The last frost lifts around 12 May, so outdoor demolition and landscaping start. The university’s academic year ends in early May and leases turn over in a city that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied. And the City runs its two-day Spring Clean-Up, the one that refuses construction and demolition debris and turns away bagged loads. We do not publish a statistic about it, because there is not an honest one to publish — but that is the shape of the Greeley year, it is the busiest fortnight we have, and the practical advice is simply to book earlier in the first half of May than you think you need to. The other end of that cycle is mid-August. Our guide to move-out and rental turnover is written for landlords and property managers who live with both ends of it.

Collection inside the city limits is the City’s arrangement and it is written down, which is more than most markets can say. § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” acting through “city-licensed operators”, and § 8-368 requires the license. We describe that regime and say nothing about our own position under it in either direction. What is constant, and what matters to you, is the part no cart program anywhere solves: no residential collection is built for construction and demolition debris. Shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, plaster, concrete and framing lumber are ours to handle, and a cart is not a kitchen tear-out, a basement or a roof.

The City makes that point better than we can, once a year. The Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up runs two days in early May — the City’s own answer to “how do I get rid of this?” — and its published exclusion list refuses exactly what a roll-off exists for: “Construction or demolition debris (including dirt, concrete, masonry, plywood, and similar materials).” Bagged loads are turned away, it is residents only with photo ID, and the line is 970-350-9336. That is not our claim about a municipal program; it is the municipality’s own list, published by the City of Greeley. Check the dates each year rather than assuming last year’s. Our guide to what the City clean-up will not take goes through it item by item.

Underneath the City sits the county, and here the county layer is unusually easy to describe because there is only one county. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county. Inside the city limits the arrangement is the City’s own, under Title 8, Chapter 11 and § 8-371, and the county sits underneath it collecting nothing from anyone. What the county runs instead is drop-off. Weld County runs a household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley — free to every Weld County resident, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, nothing leaking and nothing in a plastic bag. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there, so those need a route of their own. Paint, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and automotive fluids cannot go in a roll-off, and this is where they go instead. The county also publishes a seasonal landfill voucher, one per Weld County address, for a single load. Every one of the seventeen places on this site is in Weld County, so both of those are open to every customer we have — which is a genuinely useful thing about working in one county instead of two. Neither the drop-off nor the voucher is a curbside service and neither takes job debris. That, in a paragraph, is the argument for a container — and it is not our argument. It is the two governments’ own description of what they do and do not do.

Sizes we deliver to UNC Neighborhood